Nostalgia, an emotion we all feel. Frequently or infrequently, we feel it. We can put away sadness, but nostalgia isn’t sadness. We can allow ourselves to feel happiness, but it isn’t happiness either. It is bittersweet. It demands to be felt, in its own way. It’s when the memory makes a comeback into the mind, but along with it comes a realization hitting that life will never recreate that memory. The memory is just going to stay as it is, with the pain hitting once in a while. But it won’t be fully just pain, it will be happiness too. That such a memory exists. That such an event once happened. For we were happy when it happened. For we were just having fun, and didn’t have the slightest knowledge that we were creating memories that are going to come back and maybe, be torment for a lifetime.
In today’s world, we all try to make ourselves emotionless, we push our emotions away, as they struggle to make their way in through the logic, the practicality, the strength and the resilience that the world demands from us. We feel that abandoning those emotions is better, for they want to be felt. The more we push them away, the more they insist on making their way in. The more we push them away, the more they become a burden. The more we push them away, the more time they take for us to feel. So, let’s not frame it to be a dirty emotion, for emotions are an indicator of the purity of the heart. About how, we stay the same people we are, within ourselves, behind all the layers we put upon for protection from the world’s cruel clutches. For sometimes, those moments remind us of who we were before the world changed us.
While nostalgia is a highly emotion related world, it does have scientific research to support itself. Once considered a disorder and a disease (Yes, looking back to see how far we’ve come was once upon a time considered a disease), nostalgia now is being studied in a new light by psychologists and social scientists. Nostalgia can make one feel good about themselves, for the memories indicate that there was a journey, which is why there were memories. Nostalgia can be profoundly rooting. Nostalgia has been found to be a driver of empathy and social connectedness, and a potential internal antidote for loneliness and alienation. Nostalgia helps us make a meaning of our existence, since we all need to feel “needed” in the world. In those moments, when we feel we are “needless”, nostalgia helps us realise that we did make some moments better, by simply being in them.
As much as we attempt to drive it away, and postpone feeling it to some other time, nostalgia is one emotion that relentlessly strives to make its way in. If the nostalgia of happy times comes in during a hard time, we must remind ourselves that happy times did exist, which is why we can differentiate them from the hard ones. When the nostalgia comes in during a happy time, we can remind ourselves that the happy times that existed made us know how it felt like to be happy. We often find ourselves torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge of the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick for places we’ve never known. When nostalgia hits, thank the world. For the same world that made us hard, and extremely cautious of what we felt, taught us to feel in the first place. It gave us good times, and for the return of those, hard times come. But nostalgia is a reminder of the fact that we will keep feeling, as much as we try to push them away, and continue to live our mundane lives.
Nostalgia is a highly delicate, but also a stupendously potent emotion. In Greek, it means “the pain from an old wound”. It’s a twinge in the heart that is far more powerful than memory alone - it is the feeling of a place, where we ache to go again. To be precise, it’s just like the grammar lessons we had when we were eight: we find the present tense, but the past perfect.
“It is the heart’s way of reminding us of something we once loved. It travels in many forms: on a song, in a scent or in photographs…but no matter how it comes to you, it will always have the same bitter sweet taste.
It is an indefinable emotion - almost like happiness; a lot of sadness with a hint of longing thrown in for good measure. It is the briefest amount of time travel. In that single instant, you experience all the memories, sentiments and feelings you once held for something in your past - like an emotional echo.
But remember it is in your PAST….so let the echo fade. Don’t keep repeating it to yourself, or you’ll drive yourself crazy. Just smile, thank your heart for the reminder….and let it fade away once more”
-Ranata Suzuki
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